JD Vance is to spend a weekend with David Lammy on a family getaway at the foreign secretary’s grace-and-favour home in Kent as the two men look to cement their unlikely political friendship.
The US vice-president arrives in the UK on Friday morning for a summer break in the Cotswolds with his wife Usha and their three children.
However, the trip will begin with a weekend stay at Chevening, the foreign secretary’s grade I listed mansion, with Lammy, his wife Nicola Green and their three children.
Vance will stay at Chevening for three nights
THOMAS IMO/PHOTOTHEK/GETTY IMAGES
The pair will hold a formal bilateral meeting before being joined by their respective partners. Vance is expected to stay at Chevening for up to three nights in total.
The stay will be seen as a diplomatic coup for Lammy, who has prioritised building a personal rapport with Vance despite their political differences.
The two men first met before Vance was picked as President Trump’s running mate and Labour was in opposition as Sir Keir Starmer’s team tried to build bridges with a potential Republican administration.
In a promotional video to promote the trip Lammy said he was “meeting senior White House officials and meeting friends” before being filmed embracing and shaking hands with Vance.
On paper, the pair are not natural bedfellows. Vance has championed an America First foreign policy and described Britain under Labour as “maybe” the first “truly Islamist” country with a nuclear weapon. He also attacked the UK for undermining freedom of speech and placing the “basic liberties of religious Britons in the crosshairs”.
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However, the two men are said to have bonded over their shared experience of growing up in poverty and their Christian faith.
Speaking about their friendship previously, Lammy said: “Let me just say on JD Vance that I’ve met him now on several occasions. We share a similar working-class background, with addiction issues in our family. We’ve written books on that. We’ve talked about that. And we’re both Christians, so I think I can find common ground with JD Vance.”
Vance is reported to have rented a discreet period property near Charlbury
ALAMY
In March, Vance invited Lammy and his family to his Washington residence for several hours. Lammy joined Vance, who is a Catholic, for Mass in his home.
Speaking to The Guardian last week about their friendship, Lammy recalled socialising with the Republican alongside Angela Rayner at the inauguration of Pope Leo: “I don’t think JD and Angela will mind me saying that they were having a couple of drinks.”
The three of them were “not just working-class politicians, but people with dysfunctional childhoods”, Lammy said. “I had this great sense that JD completely relates to me and he completely relates to Angela. So it was a wonderful hour and a half.”
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While Vance’s visit to the UK is officially a private trip for his holidays, he is expected to hold several political meetings. He is thought to be hoping to meet Kemi Badenoch, the Conservative leader, with whom he has also built a friendship after meeting in Washington at the end of last year. Nigel Farage this week said only, “We’ll have to see,” when asked whether he would meet Vance.
Vance is a close friend of James Orr, the Cambridge professor, and Usha Vance spent a year at Cambridge studying. The couple were in London before the 2024 presidential election when they were given a tour of the British Museum by George Osborne, its chairman.
Orr said Vance has a love of Britain. “I’ve always had the same response to [people asking], ‘Why is he so mean about Europe? Why does he seem to hate us Brits so much?’ It’s the reverse. He’s critical of European leadership and the technocratic elite not because he hates Europe but precisely because he loves it.”
JD and Usha Vance with President Macron and his wife, Brigitte, on a trip to Paris in February
ANTOINE GYORI/GETTY IMAGES
After his Chevening stay, Vance will head for the second leg of his holiday in the Cotswolds. He is reported to have chosen a discreet period property near Charlbury, around 12 miles northwest of Oxford.
“JD Vance has rented this house in Charlbury. It’s very pretty, very bucolic, not miles away from civilisation, not deepest darkest Cotswolds,” Plum Sykes, a socialite and journalist who lives in the Cotswolds, previously told The Times.
“That area is very fashionable. It’s near Jeremy Clarkson, near Matthew Freud [the PR mogul]. If you wanted to be in the super-hot, super-social Cotswolds, that’s where you’d go,” she said. “There’s been this mass exodus from America to the Cotswolds. Americans just cannot get over the charm. Then power and money attract power and money.”